Bears do blend in to their environment quite well, but this is actually just a tree root on Harriet Island by downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, that sure looks a lot like a bear, when viewed from the right angle. So this poem will become part of my Animated Still collection. Animated stills are poems where inanimate objects take on human, animal, or spirit forms, traits, or articles. They are derived from Photographs I have taken, that have moved me to write a poem associated with it.

Providence - guided by nature, or God
Subtlest is read as 3 syllables.

The format of this poem is an Awdl - Hir a Thoddaid
An Awdl - Hir a Thoddaid is a Welsh form of poetry. There are twelve Awdl forms. An Awdl is a Welsh ode. This form contains a ten syllable quatrain followed by a Toddaid. A Hir is a set of four Isosyllabic (10 Syllables, no fixed meter) lines with the same mono-rhymed endline. A Thoddaid is the couplet with the cross rhyme aspect.
All lines of each stanza, except for the penultimate one, rhyme together in the conventional way. The penultimate line rhymes with them all in an unconventional way - an inline syllable. Furthermore, the word at the end of the penultimate line rhymes with a word somewhere in the middle of the last line. The Hir can have 6 lines, rather than the 4 used here, but all its lines must always mono-rhyme together. Frequently the stanzas are blended together without blank lines between, as I have chosen here, to give it a more Welsh feel.
Once Again,
A poem of either 6 or 8 lines.
Stanzaic: Consisting of a Hir (being either a mono-rhymed quatrain or sestet,
and a toddaid which is a couplet with interlaced rhyme.
Isosyllabic: 10 syllables
Rhyme Scheme: aaaa(ab)(ba), where the letters in parens show how the inline rhyme goes.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on March 6, 2016.

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